Initiated
Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Yates Garcia
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First Edition: October 2019
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“Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings” from CONFLICT RESOLUTION FOR HOLY BEINGS: POEMS by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Excerpt(s) from TRICKSTER FEMINISM by Anne Waldman, copyright © 2018 by Anne Waldman. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Five lines of “Medusa” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF SYLVIA PLATH, EDITED by TED HUGHES. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Print book interior design by Abby Reilly
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Garcia, Amanda Yates, author.
Title: Initiated : memoir of a witch / Amanda Yates Garcia.
Description: first [edition]. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011190 | ISBN 9781538763056 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781549143090 (audio download) | ISBN 9781538763070 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Garcia, Amanda Yates. | Wiccans—California—Los
Angeles—Biography. | Wicca.
Classification: LCC BP605.W53 G365 2019 | DDC 299/.94092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011190
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6305-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-6307-0 (ebook)
E3-20190917-DA-PC-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Caveats
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1: Familiars
Chapter 2: The Language of the Birds
Chapter 3: Leaving the Temple of the Father
Chapter 4: Blood Rites
Chapter 5: Entering the Underworld
Chapter 6: The Egregore
Chapter 7: Meeting the Fairy Queen
Chapter 8: Signs, Spells, and Omens
Chapter 9: Enemies and Allies in the Astral Realms
Chapter 10: The Demon Lover
Chapter 11: Saturn Returns
Chapter 12: How to Travel through the Underworld and Make It Home Alive
Epilogue
Gratitude
Discover More
Praise for Initiated
For my mother, for the Mother, for all my
witch sisters, brothers, and cousins across the world,
for all our ancestors going back in deep time:
healers, seers, lovers, artists, oracles, inventors, wise ones…
I see you, I love you, I honor you.
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Caveats
This book is an alchemical mixture of memoir, mythology, manifesto, theory, visions, and dreams. As in dreams, sometimes it was necessary to bend time, make grand leaps between events. I had to keep some stories in my Book of Shadows, to be told another time. Sometimes mythological figures that may be familiar to you surface here in unorthodox forms. All this is to be expected in a book written by a witch. As unconventional, unorthodox, and alchemical as these stories may be, they are also true.
For behold, I have been with you from the beginning and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.
Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk, “The Charge of the Star Goddess”
Now, I—woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Prologue
when you are in your trouble
and turn from death
this is what to do
find the meeting place:
intersectionality
under stars
way to gnosis
saying this is the place
this is indeed the place
with many layers
lie down here…
Anne Waldman, Trickster Feminism
Search for the three stars that make up the belt of Orion. I squinted through the starlight, tracing my finger along a line of instructions I’d written in my Book of Shadows, the place where witches inscribe their favorite spells. Alone at a crossroads deep in the Mojave Desert, it was to the constellation of Orion that I was to address my invocation. Into the night I chanted, “AŌTH ABRAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ.” Hot wind seared up from the borderlands near Mexico. My candles in their safety glass sputtered and died. I clamped down on the pages of my notebook lest they vanish into the spectral scrub surrounding me on all sides.
I was in the desert to perform the Headless Rite, an arcane piece of ceremonial magic where you declare yourself divine. You call down the goddess Isis to enter you; you speak in her voice: I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that life can begin. I was there because I didn’t want to, because I could not, play by the rules of the status quo anymore. I was done. Done capitulating. The Headless Rite was to be the last in a series of magical initiations I saw myself as having begun at birth.
Barefoot and virtually naked, the sheer cotton dress I used during my solitary rituals snapped around my legs like wolves in the dark. I stood inside a towering cove of red rocks, each a million years old and warm to the touch, still radiating the sun’s heat at midnight. Spiny fields of jumping cactus, luminous in the starlight, formed a sea around me, waiting to leap out and pierce my bare legs with their thorns. It was dangerous land. Rattlesnakes, coyotes skulking through the creosote brambles. But I was mostly worried about the desert dwellers: macho, meth-addled young men in their monster trucks, out there somewhere guzzling 40s, howling their bloodlust into the desert void.
Like most women and femmes, witches are familiar with the demons of patriarchy. They follow us everywhere. Even out in the desert wilderness, we can’t be alone in our rites. The shadow of violence falls unbidden, and for many of us, just the threat of it, the lifetime of warnings to be careful, the accumulation of micro and macro assaults, are enough to keep us home, “safe” under the protective aegis of the patriarchal father gods. Every time I saw headlights advancing along the horizon or heard the low growl of a motorcycle bounce off the canyon walls, I fought the urge to run and hide. But I would not be chased from my magic by bad boy bros who thought they owned the world. I was there on principle. I w
as there out of a commitment to create the kind of world I wanted to live in. A world where witches raise power in the desert. A world where a woman could chant hymns to the Goddess miles away from civilization without worrying that she might be attacked. So I chanted my incantations and spattered my libations into the red earth. And tried not to think about how I’d never had to test my magic against men who, should they appear, I felt sure would have guns.
I’ve always made it a policy to do things that scare me.
An initiation is a beginning, a rite of passage, a ceremony that signals an advance of some kind, into adulthood or a new form of knowledge. During my ceremonial initiation into witchcraft on my thirteenth birthday, my mother and I sat with a skein of red cord binding my wrist to hers inside a circle of mothers and daughters from our community. Called the Rite of Roses for the rose wands our mothers brushed against our dewy young cheeks, this was the ceremony for the adolescent witches of my coven as we dedicated our lives to the Goddess, and to each other. Lit by the glow of red candles, bouquets of roses festooned with ferns and puffs of baby’s breath perfumed our living room. Women and girls warmed the room like coals; we were there to celebrate our blood, that life force that passes through our veins, throbbing its way back to the beginning of all life on earth, carrying us forward into the unknown future we must create for ourselves. That night, we chanted the names of our matrilineal ancestors, beginning as far back into the historical mist as we could reach. When we finally spoke my mother’s name, and then mine, we used a pair of scissors as an athame—a ceremonial knife—to cut the red umbilicus that bound us together. I was now my own woman, a free agent. To celebrate, we took a walk through an overgrown suburban park, the full moon transmuting my girlfriends and me into silhouettes as we skipped ahead, giggling, through the weeds. It was an initiation in name only; I was still just a girl. And my life was about to explode.
Since then I’ve learned that more than any formal initiation ceremony given to you by an authority, your true initiation process is the one Life creates just for you. Your life initiates you to the work that only you can do. You don’t need to be born to a witch mother or receive an initiation from a high priestess to become a witch; you just need to pay attention to the lessons the Goddess is teaching you through your own experiences, and then rise up and take action.
Furthermore, witchcraft isn’t just for women. It’s for men, and trans folx, and fairy creatures and animal spirits and anything in between. You don’t need to menstruate or have a uterus to be a witch. You can find your power in being whoever you are. However, throughout this book, I refer to witches as “she,” because that’s my pronoun, and also because this book is a love letter to the femmes of the world. If you’re not a femme, this book is still for you. Any lover of the Goddess is welcome here, and even those who are just “questioning.”
In his book Rites and Symbols of Initiation, anthropologist Mircea Eliade says that puberty initiations usually begin with an act of rupture. The child is separated from her mother. Persephone is dragged down to Hades. A brutal process. Yet in Ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries were rites of initiation almost everyone chose to perform. Initiates were sworn to secrecy, killed if they ever spoke or wrote of their experience. In the fourth century CE, Christian invaders came from the north. They tore down the temple at Eleusis, ground the remains into dust, and built their churches on the rubble. Hardly any record remains of the Eleusinian mysteries. But we do know they were in honor of Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, and Persephone, her maiden daughter who was abducted to hell by the Lord of the Underworld, where she was forced to be his “bride.”
Ready or not, our traumas drag us into the underworld, initiating us, often unwillingly, into the mysteries of sex and death and, eventually, hopefully, if we’re lucky—rebirth. The latter only if somehow, by our wiles, we manage to escape the underworld labyrinth. And if we don’t, if we fail to master our initiations, we stay there, trapped, undead shades, our bones crushed beneath the temples of the oppressor.
Left to their own devices, most teenage girls are natural witches, and I was no exception. I played fortune-telling games with folded paper and contacted spirits with Ouija boards. I let the spirit of the Lover possess me as I made out with my friends. At slumber parties we used rhythmic chants to lift each other to the ceiling with our pinky fingers. We wore mood rings and ankhs and vials of blood around our necks. The world was once an enchanted place for me and my little coven of teenage witches. But even though my mother was a witch, even though I was initiated into witchcraft before I even completed my first year of high school, it never occurred to me that I could be a witch. That witchcraft could be my profession. And in our world, unless you have a trust fund, you have to have a profession. You have to work. It’s a moral imperative. And by the accounts of virtually every adult in my life, that meant you had to be miserable. Eight hours a day, sometimes more, five days a week, sometimes more, until you retired, sick and exhausted. That was what my elementary school education was training me to do and what the world expected of me. And by the time I’d skidded into my thirties, I’d tried almost every job a young woman could think of, and each one was miserable in its own special way. Yet, through it all, I resisted the imperatives of capitalist patriarchy. My goal was to avoid playing by the rules of a status quo that had actively sought to disempower me, keep me small, and utilize my labor to amass ungoddessly resources for itself. You might say that I wanted to witch the system. But every time I thought I’d found a way to escape, I always seemed to find myself back in the same place: the underworld.
By the time I was in the desert conducting the Headless Rite, it was deep summer, I’d been supporting myself as a witch for several years, and I felt more liberated and empowered than ever. In the months after my desert rite, every time I tuned in, I heard the Goddess asking me to come out of the broom closet in a big way, to stake a claim for us witches. She told me that now was not the time when the wild womxn of the world could afford to stand on decorum. It was time that we activated. It was time that we sought to inspire others. Even if we worried that we’d be laughed at or get death threats. Even if we were afraid it would be a waste of our time, that we’d lose, be judged, or get it wrong. By Her grace, I found myself holding rituals at art museums, interviewed by the LA Times, arguing politics with conservative pundits on Fox News. Mixed in with the threats of rape and beheading that I received after these appearances were hundreds of emails from people thanking me for pointing their path toward witchcraft. In the lectures I gave on witchcraft at universities, students, especially the young women, would line up, eyes hungry and shining as they gripped their binders, asking for ways they could start practicing at home. Witchcraft is an act of healing and an act of resistance. Declaring oneself a witch, practicing magic, has everything to do with claiming authority and power for oneself. Life itself initiates each of us according to our own peculiar stories. Our stories lead us toward our purpose in this world. Each initiation strips something away and gives us a gift. If we want to meet our full form, we are obligated to give that gift to the world.
I write this book because I know you, dear witches, I see you, wherever you are, pulling like a demon horse against the bridle this patriarchal world has put on you. We are allies; we are each other’s guardians. And just as I hope for this book to help you, your presence—just the knowledge that you exist—helps me to keep going myself, to flesh out my world, to make it sacred. I see you, surrounded by stones, a pleasure-seeking beast with resistance tattooed across your chest. I see you, face turned up to the moon, fists full of desert flowers. You, untamable creature, barefoot and slipping into trances. Weaving the voices of the wilderness into your songs. The seeds that drip from your fingers will regenerate the earth. All acts of love and pleasure are your rituals. You are an initiate of the Goddess of Love, even if you don’t know it yet. Take heart, dear witch, because by the end of this book, you will.
Chapter 1
F
amiliars
For many people, ordinary life itself is already a more or less unconscious process of initiation through the fire trial…
Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds
My mother’s body resisted letting me come into this world; she knew the brutal way witches are treated here. One thousand years ago, my mother would have leaned into the arms of her midwives, chanting hymns to Hecate and baptizing me in a bath of mugwort tea. Ten thousand years ago, I’d have sprung into being from a peat bog, guarded by stags, under the silver light of a waning moon. As it was, I came into the world at a teaching hospital near Sacramento, under a glare of fluorescent lights, flocked by a panic of medical students still reeking of last night’s kegger. They were unprepared for such a difficult birth.
Only twenty-three years old, but already well acquainted with the corrupting influence of the material world, my mother’s body wanted to keep me inside where I’d be safe. Her cervix wouldn’t dilate. But I insisted on making it here. I insisted on freedom. I kicked and clawed from her watery world like a reptile, until my umbilical cord tangled around my neck. I was turned the wrong way around. When my mother’s water broke, it was black; I was more Goth at birth than I ever was in my teenage years. My mother remembers being rushed on a gurney down the halls of the hospital. Flashing lights, a tube in her arm. The lightning zigzag monitoring my heart rate sagged to a flat line. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, five; my heart was still. The Goddess of the netherworld had claimed me for her own.
I died before I was born. I saw the face of the Goddess. Witches have many goddesses and Hecate is primary among them. As Guardian of the Crossroads, Hecate is a sorceress; she knows the secrets of the herbs and can speak to the dead. As Queen of Witches, she is a traveler between the worlds. She leaps through hell, a black dog by her side. She soars into the future, into the past, into the body and beyond riding on the black wings of a crow. It was Hecate I saw in my mother’s womb as I was struggling to breathe. Near-death experiences pull you into witchcraft. The Goddess pulls you under, and there you see Her face, and you know you are not alone in this world. You are a child of nature, and She will never leave you.